Bear, Otter, & the Kid 03 - The Art of Breathing (23 page)

Dominic goes to one knee and opens his arms. The boy crashes into him and babbles quietly, talking about a lion and a dog and Bear said this and Otter (pronounced “Ottah”) said that, and there was the sky and it
rained
and did Daddy see that? Didn’t Daddy see all of that? There’s a queer cadence to his voice, an almost flat and monotonous tone. For a moment, I think it might be because he’s deaf, but then Dominic says something back to him, and I can tell the boy hears him. He says it again. Daddy.

Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

“Who is this?” I hear myself ask.

Dominic turns to look at me and he pales, as if he just remembered he’d forgotten to tell me something important.

“This is Ben,” he says, picking the kid off the ground and up into his arms. “Ben, this is Tyson. He’s my… friend. And he’s Bear’s brother.”

Ben turns to look at me with eyes so much like his father that I can barely look at them. He curls his face into Dominic’s neck, trying to hide.

“Hi, Ben,” I say. I look back at Dominic and ask a question I already know the answer to. “Your son?”

Dominic nods.

“How old?”

“Just turned three a couple months ago.”

“You have a kid,” I say stupidly.

“Yeah.”

Ben leans up, grabs Dominic’s head, and pulls it down, whispering in his ear. His gaze darts to me as he speaks to his… father.

Dominic sighs and shakes his head. “Probably not.”

Ben looks disappointed.

“What?” I ask. I’m still not sure if any of this is real. This could quite possibly be a dream.

Dominic shrugged. “Ben wanted to know if you were coming over to his house.”

“No one told me.” That’s the part catching up with me the most now. There was a human being in this world directly connected to my family that I did not know existed. It’s the worst possible thing I could focus on, but I can’t help it. Everyone knew but me.

“I told them not to,” he says. “Don’t you get angry with them.”

He knows me too well. “Why?”

“Why?” he asks. Then he spits my own words back at me. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

I don’t know what to say.

“I have to get Ben home.” He turns back toward the house. “He eat?” he calls up to Bear. My brother nods, his arms across his chest. “You got the car seat?”

Bear reaches down by the door and picks it up. He walks down the steps and through the gate of the yard. Ben reaches for Bear, and Bear laughs, handing off the car seat to Dominic, trading it for the kid.

“Everything go okay with Anna?” Dominic asks as he fastens the car seat in the back of the cruiser.

Bear nodded. “Everything went fine. He’s been coloring with JJ inside.” He grins at Ben as Ben puts his hands in Bear’s hair. He babbles at him, and it hits me that I used to do that. Bear used to hold me just like that, and I’d tell him everything that ever came into my mind. I’d pull on his hair, and he’d listen and I’d talk. And talk. And talk.

They kept this from me. All of them. Even him.

“That’s Tyson,” Ben says to Bear.

“Oh?” Bear asks. He glances over at me, trying to see what he can see.

“I didn’t tell him,” Dominic says quietly. “There wasn’t time.”

Bear nods tightly. “We have some things to talk about, then, I guess.”

Dominic takes Ben from Bear and puts him in the car seat. He murmurs something to his son, and I hear Ben grunt. I almost open my mouth to inform everyone that he’s putting his son in the back of a cop car, but that doesn’t seem to be the best thing to talk about right now.

Bear looks at me, a question in his eyes.
You okay?

I look away.

Dominic closes the rear door. “Thanks, Bear,” he says.

He stops before he gets into the car. He glances back at me. There’s no real discernible expression on his face. “It was good to see you again. Stay out of trouble this summer.” Like he’s talking to a child. An acquaintance. He says nothing else as he climbs inside the cruiser pulls away. Soon it disappears from sight.

“You didn’t tell me,” I say to Bear. This no longer feels like a dream.

“I did what I thought was best,” Bear says plaintively. “What I thought was right. I will do whatever I can to keep you safe. To keep you from hurting.”

“No more,” I say without looking at him. “You don’t decide for me anymore.”

I leave Bear out on the sidewalk.

L
ATER
THAT
night, I’m wide awake and staring at the ceiling, filled with all thoughts of
him
. Kori lies curled up against me, breathing deeply. I try to push Dominic away, but he won’t leave.

And it hits me. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it at the time.

His hands. Cuffing me. Opening the door. Hands on the steering wheel. Touching my wrist. Picking up his son.

There was no wedding ring.

Where Tyson Writes Bad Poetry

and Gawks at Frat Boys

T
HE
DOORBELL
rings in the Green Monstrosity, and I open my eyes. I’m alone in the bed. I don’t know where Kori went, but it looks like she’s been gone a long time. I am starting to drift to sleep when the doorbell rings again.

I groan and sit up, sliding my feet over to the edge of the bed. For a moment, they don’t quite reach the floor and it’s like I’m nine years old again, and I think I’m in the shitty apartment and I’ll look over and Bear will be sleeping on the bed next to mine and nothing will have changed. I’m upset with him, probably more than I’ve ever been in my life, but I don’t want things to go back the way they were. Not for me. But especially not for him.

But I’m not at our old apartment. I must be still half-asleep. I’m in my room at the Green Monstrosity. I’m where I was when I fell asleep.

The doorbell rings again.

“Bear?” I call out as I walk down the stairs.

There’s no answer.

“Otter?”

Nothing.

Someone knocks on the door. My hands are sweating, because I immediately go to the worse thought ever, that it’s going to be Dominic, he’s going to be in uniform, and he’s going to say, “I’m sorry, Kid. I’m sorry, but there’s been an accident.”

I throw the door open.

“Hi, Tyson,” Julie McKenna says. “Hi, honey. You’ve gotten so big!” Her smile falters slightly. “Do you remember me?”

And I’m nine years old again. I’m in that shitty apartment again. I’m waiting for Bear and Otter to come home. They’re hanging out without me, and although I understand the need for it, the why of it, I still can’t help but feel a bit left out. I may not understand completely, but I know my brother loves Otter and Otter loves my brother, and they need time away to make sure this works, because it
has
to work. I may be just a little guy, but I know this is Bear’s last chance to find what he needs, to find the last bits of his ragged sanity and hold them together so tightly they never drift apart. And if it’s Bear’s last chance, it means it’s mine too.

But here she is, Julie McKenna, and I am nine years old and I
know
she is going to take it all away from me, take back everything that we’ve built up over the past few months. And as I stand there, staring up at her, her smile starting to slip from her face, I remember the last time I’d seen her, when she’d driven me to Anna’s house, saying she had some things to do, some things that little boys such as myself could not be a part of.

I was five then, and as I sat in the backseat of the car whose paint was chipped and whose body was rusted, I thought to myself,
Bear, oh Bear. Please come find me.

I’m nine now, and she asks me if she can come in, and I can’t
think
and I can’t
move
, and there’s an earthquake underneath my feet, and my mind shrieks
BATHTUB
.

I was five when she knocked on Anna’s door, my hand in hers, her fingernails scraping roughly against my skin. Anna answers the door, so much younger then, so pretty, and her eyes widen slightly when she sees us. She recovers quickly and smiles down at me, and such love swells in my heart because I know her. I know Anna.

I’m nine and my mother takes a step toward me and holds out her hands, and I know in my heart that she’s not trying to hug me, she’s trying to grab me and take me away. I’ll never see my friends again. I’ll never see my family again. I’ll never see Otter and Dominic (though this last causes a weird pulling sensation in my head, because I don’t know who Dominic is yet, but I still think his name). But it is my brother I think of the most. It is Bear. Bear is my life. He is my everything now. I am nine years old and I don’t know anything different. Without him, there would be no me. I know this down to my very bones.

I was five when my mother told Anna something had come up, that she needed Anna to watch me for a couple of hours. There was a strange lilt to her voice, as if she was distracted, talking from far away. I know Anna heard it, too, because a worried look crossed her face, but she pushed it aside and told my mother of course she would. Of course she could help.

“If it’s not me,” Julie said when I was five, “then Bear will pick him up.”

“I just came to see you,” Julie says when I am nine. “I came to see you because I missed you and I thought maybe we could talk. I thought maybe we could make it like it used to be, even for a little while. Wouldn’t you like that? Don’t you think we could do that?”

I back away and she must take it as an invitation, because she walks through the door and closes it behind her. “Where is your brother?” she asks, and I think,
That’s why you’re here. That’s why you came back. Bear.

I was five years old when she leaned down in front of me and put her hands on my shoulders. I was five years old when she looked me in the eye and said, “You be good, okay?” And wasn’t there something in her eyes right then? Something so close to joy and freedom that it bordered on insanity? There was, but I was only five years old and I didn’t yet have the capacity to understand the sharp edges of the world. I didn’t yet understand that when you put your hand out, you could get bitten.

I am nine years old when I find my voice, and I shout for Mrs. Paquinn. I hear the worry in her voice as she calls back, and I run for her. I run for her even as my mother says my name behind me. Mrs. Paquinn has pushed herself up from the couch and opens her arms for me and I jump into them, because I’m just a little guy still, and things are changing. Once again, things are changing.

I was five years old while I stood on the porch of Anna’s house and watched my mother drive away. Her last words to me were
I’ll see you later.

I am nine years old when she comes back for her own selfish reasons that I won’t know for years to come.

“Tyson,” she said when I was five.

“Tyson,” she says when I am nine.

I open my eyes and I am nineteen years old, lying in my bed, awoken from a dream, the dream I’m having more and more.

And for the first time in a long time, I continue to think about my mother long after the dream fades.

“Y
OU
LOOK
tired,” Corey tells me a few days later. We’re lying on the beach, a stretch of warm weather ahead of us, the sky a clear blue above. It’s the first sunny day we’ve had since I’ve come back home, and Corey’s not allowing me to wallow in my superimportant and totally reasonable angst alone in my room. He dragged me out, telling me that if he didn’t, soon I’d be pale, listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter, and writing sad poetry about how nobody understands my existence because nobody can understand the breaking of my heart like I was some overly emotional lovesick teenager.

Of course, I feigned outrage, telling him that I would
never
write angst-filled poetry, and even if I did, I
was
a teenager, so I could totally be forgiven. This, of course, was me lying through my teeth, as I’d already written the following on the back of an old protest flyer with a gnawed-on Bic pen, my soul poured into and piercing every single word:

Consternation, Thy Name Is Me

A Poem of Epic Proportions That Signifies My Current Life

(And Destroys Any Hopes For A Happy Future)

By Tyson Thompson

Oh, like the flowers in a field

my heart has unfurled for you.

Please take me as I am,

Something, something do-do-do

(I was having rhyming issues on that last part. Shut up.)

I’ll be there for you with all that I have.

For every moment of every single day.

It would be very helpful, though (for both our sakes)

if you could be like me, a super awesome gay.

(That last part was written to make me feel better. It worked. I
am
super awesome.)

It’d make life so much easier,

if only you could look at me see

that I am already gay for you (and everyone else).

So why can’t you be gay for me?

(Yes, I went there. Sorry. It’s not like my life is a book with chiseled headless torsos gracing the cover. I’m not chiseled, and I am pretty sure my torso is shaped funny. Which, as a side note, why are there always muscled men with abs and no heads? Don’t they own clothing? Can’t they stand far away enough from the camera to get their faces in the shot too? Don’t they ever get tired of doing crunches and sometimes just want to sit in a recliner in front of a TV and eat cookie dough straight out of the tube? It’s not like you look at it and go, “Wow. I am
so
glad that guy has an eight-pack and is standing in an awkward pose. Also, I am happy to know what his chin looks like but not the rest of his face. That’s going to let me enjoy the story more.”)